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Near infrared light is light with a wavelength of 800 nm to 2500 nm, and absorption and scattering of light in the living body are smaller than visible light, and it is possible to observe deep parts of the living body that can not be observed with the naked eye . Therefore, near infrared light is actively used in the medical field. Among medical equipment using near-infrared light, in this research, we focused on developing an endoscope using near-infrared light. Endoscopes are non-invasive and do not need to be hurt by a scalpel and can be observed in real time.

In this study, it is difficult to detect visually and is difficult to detect early in the muscular layer in the submucosa of digestive organs such as the stomach and small intestine, and it is difficult to detect early and to the digestive tract called GIST (interstitial stromal tumor). The research target is a tumor that can be

When making a diagnosis, use machine learning to determine whether each cell is a tumor cell or a normal cell, and the tumor cells are drawn in green and normal cells are drawn in yellow. When creating learning data used in machine learning, marking by a doctor is used.

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In recent years, many people with developmental disability characteristics such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are considered to exist. However, there are many cases in which people live their lives unaware that they themselves have developmental disability characteristics, resulting in difficulties in social life. Therefore, we believe that it is important to accurately understand the characteristics of ASD based on an accurate diagnosis, and to take countermeasures.

In addition, it is said that people with ASD characteristics are not good at observing others' movements and predicting others' intentions.

Therefore, the purpose of this study is to elucidate from a brain science approach the differences in the characteristics in the "passing motion," which requires predicting the direction of the other person's motion and avoiding it. In the future, we intend to use a simple electroencephalograph (EEG) as shown in the photo to clarify the findings on ASD characteristics.

2023

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Post-stroke survivors have lower limb spasticity due to myotonic tonus on triceps of calf. It is crucial to preserve their ankle joint flexibility to prevent the development of stiffness. This ankle rehabilitation device with Bowden cables inspired by a bike brake system successfully assists two ankle combination movements: supination and pronation without restricting axes of motions. Due to the rigid body, typical ankle devices are constrained to only four single movements: plantarflexion, dorsiflexion, inversion, and eversion. It is highly recommended that each ankle be tailored because everyone has their own range of motion. The device developed in this work uses four stepper motors and a controller, achieving to adjust the length of four wires to determine the maximum range of motions for each person. Trials with twenty females at the mean age of 21.5 ± 3.2 confirm that patients can do broader range of motions with less muscle contractions: Tibialis Anterior (TA), Medial Gastrocnemius (MG), Peroneus Longus (PL), and Soleus (SOL) when wearing the device. There is high expectation on the device that it could help stroke survivors to maintain their ankle joint flexibility with natural ankle movement in the future.

2023

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There are anatomical and physiological similarities between humans and animals, especially mammals. Therefore, the knowledge gained from animals can be applied to humans and plays an important role in various fields such as behavioral pharmacology, which evaluates the effects of drugs by administering them to animals and assessing changes in their activities, and neuroscience, which elucidates brain function from information such as brain waves.

At the Takemura Lab, a predictive model has been developed to predict the voluntary activity of mice, which are experimental animals. By capturing the features from the past activity of mice, the predictive model can predict (generate) future activities that have not yet been seen. On the other hand, since mice are also considered to make decisions for their next actions based on some kind of thought, the predictive model can be seen as representing the "thinking" of the mouse. The predictive model has great potential in that it enables research on animal thought, which has been difficult to capture until now.

2023

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Motor paralysis caused by stroke is a serious problem in today's aging society, and rehabilitation for recovery is extremely important. In recent years, research on rehabilitation using devices has been conducted. However, rehabilitation using devices often requires simple movements, and maintaining motivation is a problem.

In this study, we focus on the "sense of agency," the feeling that "I am creating the movements myself," to improve the rehabilitation process. Specifically, we aim to measure the patient's "sense of agency" using NIRS (Near InfraRed Spectroscopy) during device rehabilitation and feed it back to the device to adjust the movements. Using this method, we aim to propose a rehabilitation device with a greater "sense of agency."

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Cows are facing the problem of low birth rate as with human. Milk production per cow has been also stagnant. For these reasons, overall production is expected to decline in the future. The nutritional status of cows is considered to have an influence on these problems, so it is necessary to develop a system for managing the nutritional status properly.

Body condition score (BCS) is an indicator of nutritional status. BCS can be determined by the shape of the body surface. The purpose of this research is to develop an inexpensive and highly accurate system which can evaluate automaticalcally.

We install a three-dimensional camera in the cow's passage on a ranch, and it keeps shooting and transmitting data to the server automatically over a long term. The stored data is processed appropriately for deep learning. We have developed a system which can analyze the large amount of data using deep learning and determine BCS with high accuracy. Now, We are tracking better accuracy accurancy and improving the device to be a versatile which can be used for other passage of cows.

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In recent years, Japan has entered an aging society. The number of arthropathy patients is increasing along with it, but there is concern about the absolute number shortage of physical therapists (PTs) who perform rehabilitation. Therefore, development of a device to perform passive exercise (rehabilitation) instead of PT is required.

In this study, we focused on the ankle joints that perform complex movements, which greatly affects human walking ability. Human ankle joints perform complex motions with six degrees of freedom, but many conventional passive motion devices perform simple motions with one degree of freedom, and devices that perform motions with other degrees of freedom by changing the rotation axis Although there is also a fixed axis, it is difficult to say that it is sufficient for the degree of freedom of the ankle joint.

Based on the above, in this study, with the aim of "Development of a rehabilitation support device that performs motion considering the rotation axis of the tarsal joint", development of a six degree of freedom rehabilitation support device The estimation is done.

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Orthodontic treatment is performed as a treatment to cure the dentition cleanly. In recent years, the number of patients in orthodontic treatment tends to increase, and the increase in the number of treatment times may cause an increase in accidents during corrective treatment caused by excess and deficiency of load applied to teeth.

Although proper orthodontic treatment requires orthodontic treatment in terms of both mechanical factors and biological factors, treatment depends on the experience and sense of the dentist, and tooth movement There has not been a quantitative evaluation of the force transmitted from the correction device at the time of. In previous researches, measuring devices using simulated teeth and sensors have also been developed, but they are still inadequate as measuring devices such as those whose moment is not measured by force alone or those for which it is difficult to attach an actual treatment instrument .

This study aims to quantitatively evaluate orthodontic treatment, and by combining a simulated dentition with a 6-axis force sensor, it is possible to simultaneously measure the 3-axis force / moment applied to the teeth during treatment. We are developing a new sensing system.

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In recent years, accidents and injuries due to falls during walking have become a problem regardless of age. Therefore, early detection of gait abnormality is very important. Conventional gait analysis methods are rarely used in diagnosis because they require special preparations and devices. Therefore, a new method that can easily diagnose walking in a short time is expected.

In this research, we capture human's walking from front to back and right and left with a portable device, and continuously reproduce and reproduce a moving image for one walking cycle. We proposed a new gait analysis method that can be diagnosed visually by creating a moving image that walked in a fixed position, and conducted a verification experiment. It is expected that this method can distinguish human's gait abnormality and its cause more easily than simply observing human's gait.

As a result of the verification experiment, the result that impression evaluation and quantitative evaluation were useful was obtained. In the future, we plan to create walking videos of many subjects and apply to deep learning.

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ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder) is an autism spectrum disorder and is a generic term for Asperger's syndrome and autism. It has been reported that gait characteristics are related to pedestrian ASD characteristics, and all those studies are experiments with single gait. The patient's characteristic is that they have social communication disorder, but I thought that the characteristic of ASD appears more largely under interactive condition.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the correlation between gait characteristics and ASD characteristics under interactive conditions in a typically developed adult male. The survey of ASD characteristics was quantitatively evaluated using a questionnaire for a typical developing person (who had never been diagnosed with mental illness). In order to investigate gait characteristics, we conducted a gait experiment under the situation where two people passed each other.

As a result of analyzing the two numerical values ​​using multiple regression analysis, it was found that the ASD characteristics can be explained by the parameters of the hip and left foot. We will conduct experiments under further conditions in the future to continue more detailed investigations.

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In order to elucidate the pathophysiology of osteoarthritis, it is necessary to analyze the relative positional relationship between the two bones of the foot (the tibia and the calcaneus). Recently, several studies have been reported to investigate the relationship between these bones in patients with osteoarthritis. These studies analyze bone relationships using medical images such as CT and x-rays. However, these medical images are two-dimensional images, and the displacement in the front direction can not be calculated. The amount of displacement in the front direction can be calculated by three-dimensional analysis.

In this study, we present a method to analyze the relative position of tibia and ribs three-dimensionally. In the proposed method, a three-dimensional bone model was created and the positional relationship was analyzed. We created a bone model that can be scaled based on bone thickness using principal component analysis (PCA). Next, the created bone was scaled to be the same as the thickness of the bone to be analyzed. Then, using the Go-ICP algorithm, the bones were superimposed, the amount of displacement at that time was calculated, and the positional relationship of the bones was analyzed.

As a result, it is possible to calculate the amount of displacement in the frontal direction and to calculate the amount of displacement in the direction that could not be analyzed from a two-dimensional image.

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In present-day Japan, there are more than one in 10 patients suspected of having diabetes. Furthermore, 1 in 3 people suffer from a disease called diabetic neuropathy. If the disease gets worse, it will lead to necrosis and amputation of the foot, treatment is extremely difficult, but if the symptoms are light, treatment with medical treatment etc. is possible.

However, current inspection methods require a great deal of work. Therefore, it is expected to establish a method that enables early detection of diabetic neuropathy by a different examination method from the past. Previous studies have shown that diabetic neuropathy patients have poor blood flow in the foot and that the amount of sweating reduces the skin on the sole of the foot.

In this research, we think that differences occur in the contact area of ​​the sole and floor on soft and hard floors, and propose a method to determine the severity by comparing the magnitude of the difference from image processing did. Currently we are conducting experiments to verify the usefulness of the proposed method.

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Skeletal muscle weakness is an important factor in many different chronic diseases and aging, so it is an important task to elucidate the skeletal muscle weakness mechanism nowadays when the improvement of healthy life span is required. Important morphological features of muscle fibers, such as the cross-sectional area, shape, type, number and location of muscle fibers, are one of the important factors that determine muscle health and function. Histological analysis of skeletal muscle in consideration of these morphological features is required to elucidate the relationship between chronic disease and aging and skeletal muscle weakness.

However, at present, quantification of the morphological features of these muscles is still a manual or semi-automatic method based on muscle measurements and requires extensive human intervention. It is required to analyze skeletal muscle to reduce the time and effort required to quantify the morphological characteristics of muscle. Therefore, we developed software that automates the task of image analysis of skeletal muscle by utilizing image processing.

Apply γ correction as pre-processing to the Watershed method so that the cell division in the image can be divided into regions simply by one-touch with the mouse, and to classify the cells by type, the luminance value for each cell or Automatic classification was made possible from the values ​​of color and cross-sectional area independently of the human eye. As a result, it became possible to reduce the analysis time to 1/5.

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A treatment that involves inserting a needle without dissection is called puncture treatment. Because the burden on the human body is small, it is positively adopted when applicable, but in recent years, puncture therapy for cancer treatment has also been developed. However, since existing methods cauterize cells with heat, there are many conditions that can not be applied such as in the vicinity of blood vessels.

In this study, we aim to develop a puncture treatment device using a pulsed laser. The pulsed laser can deliver high power energy in a very short time, so it is possible to transpire cells regardless of the cooling effect of blood vessels. In addition, it has been confirmed that the thermal effects on the surroundings can be suppressed more than existing treatments.

Currently, with the goal of developing a prototype as a short-term goal, we are working on elucidating the effects of changes in each parameter on transpiration and developing the device tip.

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In recent years, attempts to reduce accidents while walking and to support rehabilitation have been made by intervention in human walking. Intervention means include electrical stimulation, sound and vibration stimulation. Among these, vibration stimulation is expected to be applied in many fields because it is the simplest and non-painful stimulation that is applied directly to the body.

TVR (Tonic Vibration Reflexion) is one of the physiological phenomena using vibrational stimulation. This is a physiological phenomenon in which muscle spindles (sensors that sense the length of the muscle) illusion the signal of muscle relaxation during vibration stimulation, and muscle contraction occurs involuntarily. Although there are many previous studies that attempt to change gait using this phenomenon, the reality is that it has not been systematically reaped.

Therefore, in this research, we aim at giving up the result of gait change by vibration stimulation and elucidating the universal mechanism of TVR. In the future, we aim to apply it to motion change and motion instruction using vibration stimulation.

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Elderly care facilities are facing a shortage of staff, and it is not possible to fully understand the daily lives of each individual elderly person. Especially It is difficult to understand the lives of the elderly in rooms. There is a need for a system that can help to understand the daily lives of the elderly in their rooms without relying on human labor.

In this research, RGBD sensor (KinectV2) is installed in the environment where elderly people live. We will develop an analysis method to understand the daily life of elderly people based on the 3D data and the skeletal information of the elderly people obtained from the sensor. Based on the relationship between the elderly and objects in environment, such as beds and wardrobes, and spaces such as doorways, the behavior of the elderly is understood.

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